Musharraf wins wider powers

President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has won a vote of confidence that will leave him in office until 2007 and give him sweeping powers, including the right to sack the government.

The decision followed a deal with an alliance of Islamist parties, under which General Musharraf promised to resign as army chief in 12 months.

The vote involved both houses of the national Parliament and the four provincial assemblies. General Musharraf won a narrow victory of 658 votes out of the combined 1170 seats.

"Parliament has consolidated his position," Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali said after the vote.

Secular opposition parties staged noisy protests in both houses of Parliament, chanting "Go, Musharraf, go", before walking out to boycott the vote.

"It is most unfortunate that the new year has begun on a such a sad note," said Senator Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for the Pakistan People's Party of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Although the margin is slim and demonstrates the strong opposition to General Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, the vote offers him more legitimacy than the referendum of April 2002. In that vote, effectively a plebiscite, he became President as the only candidate.

For the past year, all the assemblies have been paralysed by a stand-off between the pro-army governing party, the Pakistan Muslim League, which is led by Mr Jamali, and two alliances of opposition parties that refused to accept General Musharraf holding two jobs as president and army chief.

General Musharraf had been negotiating with one of these alliances, the coalition of Islamists known as Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal, for several months. He finally secured a deal late last month in which he agreed to give up his uniform in December in return for passage of amendments to the constitution giving him virtually unlimited power.

The amendments were passed this week with the support of the Islamists. However, members of that coalition said they would not vote for him as President, but would not vote against him either. As a result, the entire opposition abstained.

General Musharraf was forced to cut the deal with the Islamists after surviving two assassination attempts last month that badly weakened his position.

Hard-line Islamists are furious with him for supporting the US-led "war on terrorism" in which Pakistan arrested hundreds of Taliban fighters and al-Qaeda militants and handed them over to the United States.

He barely escaped the second attack, on Christmas Day, in which two suicide bombers rammed explosives-packed vehicles into his convoy, killing 16 people and wounding more than 50.

He was also desperate for a vote of confidence so that he could talk to the Indian Government as a legitimate ruler, rather than a military usurper.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee arrives in Islamabad today for a South Asian summit and will attend a dinner with General Musharraf - their first meeting for more than two years.

India's Foreign Minister, Yashwant Sinha, who left for Pakistan on Thursday, said he hoped General Musharraf would make the present ceasefire in Kashmir permanent.

Relations have greatly improved since the ceasefire was announced in November. A regular commercial flight between India and Pakistan left Lahore for New Delhi on Thursday, the first since ties were cut in 2002 over the Kashmir dispute.